Frazier

An heroic figure is, of both genders and, of neither too. We know this, as our very own Greek heroic, one name of Sappho, said that we should love whatever we love, using a neuter form to label the object of affection. Clearly, it could be a wolf, name of Diefenbaker, or a woman, or a man, or a rock, too.

Old stories lie in us and in tv shows, and wait for a time, sometimes a long time, to come out and play. The show, "Due South," has as old a story to tell, as there is. This guy, Benton Frazier, gets kicked around a lot, and comes back with a straight face and a strong heart, to take more of whatever his Chicago can inflict. I shall refer to him at length, calling him Benny, for Benton, or Frazier, or the Mountie, as that is what he is, a Canadian Mountie in the U.S. on an assignment.

The tv show, "Due South," is the place where the hero lives and breathes, among a cast of actors and actresses hard to duplicate on tv. They are so good. Benton Frazier is not an action hero. He does not go looking for trouble like some of our American ones do. He is more passive like me, so I identify with him.

I am, in fact, not a hero at all. But my imagination thinks of me as one. I have the curious ability to stand in one place for days and years and listen to the wind tell me what some benighted place is about. This exercise I am engaged in here is one of a series of vids on the parking lot at Bob's up in Revere.

One trait of a hero is the ability to stay still. Frazier does this, as he lets evil or negative forces hit him, while he just repels them, and then goes on being still. That's why I see him as a passive hero, as opposed to a frenetic, aggressive one. We catch him at rest a lot and he is most endearing in this stance.

Passivity is a trick of the gods. The old ones from the East, who, when they didn't know what to do, just stood there mute.

For some years to this date, January 1,1997, I have stood mute and watched the years go by, as the cardboard cutout in Sozio's window has. I found out a few days ago that the land on which Sozio's and Bob's Discount stands, used to be the Revere airport. That when Sully, a friend at Bob's who has lived his whole life in Revere, was a kid, he used to pay twenty cents and ride a tank over the property, through a make-believe world of hills and tunnels the proprietors of the tank ride had created. I guess the land got to be a tank ride, after it served the community as an airport and later became the famous Bob's Discount it still is.

Here is where I come in. I have stood for some time in the parking lot and observed the world. Early in the AM before dawn's light, and later in the day, when the light of the sun is leaving for one more time. In high wind, snow and rain and mist and just plain nice weather, when I would look at my watch and despair that soon I would have to break down and go home. I sell stuff and begin to break down at three or so to get home in time to do the supper.

I so enjoy the sound of trucks and cars on Squire road, the calls of the seagulls. The great Atlantic Ocean is a scant mile or so away. I've only been over there once or twice but I can assure my audience it is there. The talk of the people in a varied set of tongues, the looks and the smiles of the people who pass by, on the way into the store.

Bob's is headquarters and I am a passive who just sits and looks. It is just something I like to do and feel comfortable doing. Hey, I'm a camera. Don't blame me. I am too much a coward to be a real hero, so I just stand dumb.

In all this, I contemplate life as I find it, and mostly, like what I see. Feel as though I can make some sense of the thing we have here in America. That makes me a valuable property, as I claim to have a legitimate window on what passes for life in America.

My images of Mr. Frazier, Mountie Frazier, blend in with the daily things I see at the parking lot at Bob's. All it requires to mix life and the teevee is patience, and the time to get it all down and on to the videotape. It results in another attempt on my part to analyze and appreciate the culture of our time at this point late in the century. I do it to pacify and reconcile the disparate forces that form my consciousness. I find I can reproduce that set of ideas and visions in a vid that I can play at home as I contemplate where my life is carrying me next. The video completed as this one soon will be, is a blueprint for me of the culture and gives me a clue on where I may go next. That is to say, I don't expect to be in Revere forever, and as a traveling man expect to be reassigned to a new spot sometime where I will just stand there and talk to me in the vids I make on the dear, new spot.

Where, I ask myself, would I like to go next? That is easy. I would like to stand on a street in Boston and look up at the sky and observe and communicate with the skyscrapers, the signs on the stores and in the windows, and listen and record the actions of the people walking down the street. I imagine I would smile a lot at them as I do now at the customers at Bob's.

My other fantasy is to work in a mall, a pretty one, a big one like the Atrium at Chestnut Hill. I am so overwhelmed by that mall I have not mustered the courage to visit it again since I did a video there a few years ago.

My dream is to stand there, just stand there, for years and let the world wash over me. Of course, I gutta have a tv goin' round in my consciousness so I can pick up another source of stimulation to blend in with the daily life. Thank goodness, I have Benton and the wolf, Diefenbaker with me all the time.

On to the parking lot at Bob's.

If a passive stance is a virtue, it behooves one to examine the posture. Blondy has it. She stands in the window, observes seasons. She stays warm or cool as the seasons dictate.

Every day the carriage woman wheels past at around six-thirty in the morning, her head usually covered by the black scarf, her carriage filled with empty cans and bottles, wrapped in big and bulging garbage bags. As I have said elsewhere, she is earnest, cheerful and resolute and sometimes waves me a hello. I don't know if she recognizes Blondy in Sozio's window, whether she gives her a greeting or not. Is the figure Marilyn Monroe? I think so.

Carriage lady is invisible to the world around her. By seven she's gone and the day can begin. Few humans see her, or so it seems to me. I see her as a passive heroic figure like me and the cutout in Sozio's window. I lump her into my pantheon. She becomes one of us, an "invisible." We are "in...visible." That is to say we reside in the visible. Only no-one can see us in our house. We are visible in a land of visible objects, but only to ourselves. To the rest of the world we are invisible, unable to be seen or registered by the eyes of the common world.

I am a student of passive heroics, because these folks seem to me to make great sense as contributors to human life. Passive heroics may be people or cutouts or cats or tv figures who live in my head. From these passives we may learn what life really is about, and I do figure what life is really about, as I stand there, while the carriage lady slowly, very slowly, as she is old, weaves a path down Squire Road early every day.

Life is about appreciation mostly. The sense that life is rich if we take the time to see it in its daily form, then add just a little to the shared daily life for others. The carriage lady recycles. She cleans human space and that is her contribution. The cans get recycled, I imagine. She is a conservator who wheels quietly over the community with nary a sound.

I write poems on the American and the Greek culture. I record and celebrate the richness of my physical and mental environment. And Blondy just keeps watch in Sozio's window, watch over the parking lot at Bob's. She is beautiful while she keeps watch.

We take little, as we're already complete. We give a little. That is we pick up cans, look pretty or compose some little lines of poetry or produce forgettable vids.

Our society is filled with heroics. Figures who are heroic. Like Marilyn, the carriage woman and me. Some have names. Benton Frazier. Who will lead us out of temptation and give our lives more meaning. They may be ordinary forces. I, or the carriage woman. Or a cutout. Some are figures from the tv and magazine ad. Figments of electronic imagining. Live or imaginary does not matter to me. The two blend beautifully, as I think and feel my way through a day.

Heroic images blend in anyhuman's mind and become fact. An element of what passes for modern reality. One has to take the tv seriously, and I do. I have come to see that heroic figures like Frazier enrich and ennoble my life. He does so much for me, or I wouldn't be casting him in a production I do for the cable.

I wrote a poem up at the Manhattan Bagel where I go on the days I visit the parking lot at Bob's. It is up the street and I walk there, after I park at Bob's at around six AM. It is a five minute walk and gets the arthritis kicking in my knee, so sometimes I limp a bit. I get there though, and always doodle with paper, as I eat my daily blueberry, fat-free muffin.

I wait to see what arrives on the pen. Like Blondy does, or Benton Frazier, I wait until the thing is given, a poem or a term or an idea, and then go back to life as usual. Worry which I do a lot, or smiles, or hard work, or getting used to being out in the cold, or whatever happens to come. I hear a lot of stories from the live people around me at Bob's, who use me to tell their stories to. They are walking story machines. I don't know whether they know I am a human being who also has stories to tell, but it doesn't seem to matter. I never get to tell my stories to them. They are so filled with sentences that begin with "I",

that I, the I that is I, can never get a word in edgewise.

Some time ago, I think it was in 1978 in Boston, I simply ceased to exist. So I just listen and enjoy the stories they tell. I am not sure I exist to them, but I never let it bother me much. The live people at Bob's sure have their needs, pulling on them and hauling them around all the time.

These people tell me stories. I never tell them stories. They are not interested. They're busy. They do not stop long enough for me to say, "look, there is this cutout in Sozio's window. She is to be called, forever more, the Lady of the Lot."

They have not seen the show called "Due South," and if they did, wouldn't like it probably. So I do what any passive person does; just boogie along, smile a lot, and keep my mouth shut. I hear a lot of stories about the world my buddies live in. The world the customers live in.

I end up telling stories to myself on the cable, to amuse myself and pass the time. What is on the screen is some thing I find pretty. That is its most salient characteristic. The video I do is pretty. I love pretty things and when I can create them, it makes me feel so fine. What is more, I can do a vid on the parking lot at Bob's and then another one with no hesitation. I can do a video on an artist I like or one on Franklin where one of my favorite artists comes from. Or a video on Dover where I live. It all comes out right and pretty to me, as all the things I do please me or I wouldn't do them in the first place. I talk to my self barely above a whisper. Then pronounce it good. I got that idea from the painter, Louise Bourgeois who said that is how she views her artistic production. With not a nod or care about what the others around her think. She, like me, does what she does for her own purposes only.

I got to thinking about a lord's prayer that didn't start with asking for something. Like "give us this day our daily bread." It seems presumptous to me to dial into the Lord and immediately tell her to give us this day some bread. How impolite!

I suppose that is what happens in real life, though. We tell the deity to feed us and afterward we will sing her or his praise as the lord, our god. I have enough money to get a bagel or a muffin up at the bagel place where I go to write and get warm at, when the weather is cold. So, who am I to beef about telling the lord to feed us daily bread. I get my bagel, so I should really keep quiet.

Anyway I wrote my own poem about prayer. As I pray a lot to keep fear at bay. I am afraid a lot. Scared.

One lord's Prayer

Give us this day

a chance to play

to sit to pray.

A joyous day

a silent nite

Give us this day

to do what's right

so we can get

some kinda

salvation.

So much for poems. I cannot say what they are about, other than to say they are a shorthand for how you feel down deep and are too wishywashy to admit.

My poem entreats the deity to give me one more time to try to be good.... in a passive way. My approach to the universe is important for me to describe. I cover my bases as I pray to god, and live a passive existence, amid real persons and tv figures who I imagine are like me. Passive and good.

When you have heroics, heroic figures to admire, you experience some false hope that you matter and may survive to live another day. I have an active imagination. My daily life is very dull if the truth be said, so I escape, sort of, into my mind, to make the time go faster and I find that Benny Frazier is part of my daily fantasy.

He occupies me, like one of Manhattan Bagels does. He is a kind of food. Here is what he means to me. I will compare him to a lone shepherd on a hill in Greece. It will take me a little time to reach for what the Mountie means to me, so just be patient with me.

I can relate to the shepherd on a Greek landscape.

In the land we call Greece, seen in the eyes of the one we call Henry Miller, there is first of all the shepherd. This unisex figure is alone on a hill and needs little from the village below. This person is a loner and Miller tells us he strokes the beards of the sheep in his care and mutters incantations. Perhaps like in my poem above, the shepherd asks that we be spared from personal tragedy,and that we have the time to enjoy life.

This is all mindless nonsense, what I am saying here, but I persist in thinking it is artistic nonsense, nonetheless.

The Greek shepherd in Henry Miller's book, "The Colossus of Maroussi," is a being Miller creates to tell his story. He makes it all up. And I write some little poem to say my story. I make it up. My life and that of the shepherd who stays alone and quiet are related.

I have always believed the world was in my care and that it was my job to say the world as best I could. I play the role of caretaker and then take the whole thing seriously. I like to collect and videotape photographs so they will be saved. The poems in the vids go with these old pictures or new pictures or whatever I film and the business I do looks to me like what I dream about. The work I do looks to me like my thoughts put on the screen.

I call what I do my art. Any serious poet, shepherd or vid maker, does the same thing. Registers things that tap into the heart of the world. Our artistic efforts are but ways to explain our world so we will do a better job of our daily lives. Reduce the alienation, the killing, the hatreds, etc.

Only by being quiet and alone for long periods can you hear the world. That way you can feel and then say and communicate what you think about this and that.

I have had a funny feeling watching "Due South," that the people who staged it were somehow very special and tapped into a force I cared about. Watching the show has been a deep experience for me. Real, powerful, very, very special. For me, they tap into the heart of the world, a place where poems, drama and beauty live.

In the show they employ a wolf to help Frazier endure, in the city of Chicago. He carries in him the knowledge nature teaches us all. He is from the frozed north, has in his genes the teachings of the wind, the cold, the ice and trees. The wolf is with him to reinforce constantly Benny's attachment to nature.

In the show they have a dead father, Benton's, who pops up to needle and occasionally counsel a beleaguered Frazier. The wolf and the father prop him up when he is in need. As I watch an episode here and there on videotape, I get the sense that the show and my thinking are related. That I and they are on the same wavelength, so to speak. I connect to the figure of the Mountie. I feel for him, admire him, want to be like him. He is so courageous and good. And resolute and kind. Like I would like to be but am afraid to be.

Mostly they show this lone figure of a Mountie who resolutely goes about doing what is right. He waits for danger to be there, counters it and then goes back to just standing there. A passive hero. A shepherd tending his flock. Unconcerned about time and the village below him. And the village is uncaring about him and his reality too. Frazier does his thing in Chicago and just goes home to be simple and invisible as a hero.

Funny that a modern story can elicit these kinds of feelings in me. I am able to connect a tv figure to some Greek musings in the writings of Henry Miller.

Henry Miller goes on and on about the shepherd in his book, "The Colossus Of Maroussi." He makes all sort of funny statement. I have become convinced that Miller is out of control, and the stuff he says just comes through him, is not created by him, but is received like poetry is. He is a blind bard who just gets it down and is smart enough to let that be enough. He is a terrific artist who says things we feel but don't know how to say.

He says that the shepherd "moves leisurely in the amplitude of forgotten time." One of the things true of any period in history is that time can be erased. That is what artists do. I mean it in a positive sense. Not that we have forgotten the difference between real and imaginary time, but the idea I have is that after we are done meeting our maintenance needs, we can turn to the timeless pursuit, the one of art. The day's bread is gained and then we play.

Like the shepherd we go into the timeless dimension and tell stories to ourselves and one another.

Serious humans like me and Frazier take care of business, and go idle after work is done. That is what I mean by moving in a time that is forgotten. Not the timelessness of a prescription drug or marijuana or a tee vee show or a ballgame. Not the time lapse of the internet or a bad novel or a good one. It is the imagination that is the concern in the shepherd's mind where forgotten time breeds story and myth. The imagination is to make stories anew, so the ones after us will have them, so they can then make up their own. To just consume stories is not enough. We have to make our own.

This place, our America, is a suspended animation place and a place of dreams. For a person like me, it is based on a silence and not techno-noise. It is a place you have to work at to get to. The shepherd is a serious artist. He is like Benton Frazier between missions to save the world. In his silence, in mine and that of the shepherd, words germinate to carry the world to a safe place. Poetry is being formed. So is the next issue of "Due South." The next story of the parking lot at Bob's reaches the cellophane tape. In silence and contemplation comes new vision. Too much noise, too many people talking at once, too much tv and radio noise, is just noise, not art. In silence is creation. Any artist or shepherd or Mountie knows and will testify to that.

It is in that quiet place in Charles Burchfield's mind that a watercolor may develop. A working class street in a rundown town in upstate New York, painted by an anonymous fellow, who used to design wall paper for a living. Who battled debilitating depression at crucial phase of his life. Long before he got famous, Charles Burchfield, one of my passive heroic figures, reached into his silence and plucked out a series of perfectly grand watercolors of poor structures, houses, in the colds of Middle West America. This place of silence is the room of art.

It is in the place that I write my pieces on the parking lot.

There, Edward Hopper did stunning pictures of boats, ladies, office managers, scenes of people at play for a variety of trade magazines that he hired out to, to make enough money to do his serious work. His magazine illustrations are absolutely beautiful, even though he renounced them routinely.

In the room of forgotten time, all good things get better. In shepherds' time the poetry of the world is written. Great visual art is made. Too, the tv adds its measure to the treasury of art. Benny Frazier saves the girl, saves his partner and fellow cop, thwarts the bad person out to kill him. Then goes home to his quiet place to eat his supper with Diefenbaker and go to bed.

Frazier is everyman and everywoman. An archetype, in Jung's world. This world-class thinker spent tons of solitary time trying to understand the world so we could live better. He tried to cure us our ills so we would not self-destruct. His laboratory we are told is the big stone house he built on a lake in Switzerland, where he found quiet and solitude.

I imagine that Jung would have liked Frazier and identified with him. The Mountie is like the shepherd on Miller's hillside in Greece. He is a guardian of human kind. He does not discriminate among people. He loves us all and tries to get us to live right and love one another. He watches over his flock in urban Chicago. Like the shepherd alone on the Greek hillside cares for the sheep.

The sheep need him there or they will get eat. Frazier faces all sort of danger but lives to resume his quiet stance on guard for the people of Chicago. He wills out and toughs on.

I have this fantasy that Frazier is resisting what comes of all of us who go the regular way to the suburbs. He may succcumb to one of the beauties who try to seduce him on the tv. A woman, I reason, will come over you, Benton Frazier, and tempt you to get to raise kids in the suburbs. Imagine, I say to me, Most Eminent Mountie Benny Frazier, going out for a happy meal at the fast food joint and then trucking over to Walmart to pick up some decorations for Halloween's and a pair of five and a half sneakers.

Improbable. If he got to be like us, we would have nothing to dream about. So we keep poor Benny up there on the mountain, in solitary land, with no human to comfort him. Alone. Alone. Plain alone, but somehow, not lonely, as he has nature in the form of a wolf and the dead father to comfort and help keep him company, help him keep house.

Benny. Benny. My very own Benny.

I says to him, "you make me remind myself of me and how the modern world makes me feel. It doesn't care about me but that is alright because I have you, Benny and the cutout in Sozio's window and the carriage lady and the squacky seagull and the wolf I love, name of Diefenbaker".

It sure is a funny world. Welcome 1997. Hope you are a good year for us all. I don't know if they will make Bob's parking lot into a fire station for the city of Revere, as I have heard, or an apartment complex. For the last few days a bunch of workmen and machines have been digging in the street which runs inside the parking lot, now called Ferragamo Way, replacing defective pipe. What does that bode? Who knows? Such indecision and uncertainties to live with. I can barely stand it. I can barely imagine life without Bob's to visit and play at.

Faraway Frazier as I call him, stays superhuman. He never stoops long to be like us. Death has no power over him. Nor injury or blindness. He goes on and on, driven by the power of right and his Mountie pledge, whatever that is. An idea drives him. An idea drives the lone shepherd Miller tells us about on a Greek mountainside. He hears the little bells of the sheep, looks up to an azure sky. Miller sees the shepherd in the crook of the hill standing there and wonders what he is thinking about.

Many of us stand hour after hour listening to the world. The shepherd, me, and blondy in Sozio's window, the one called Lady of the Lot. We are grappling to hear what idea it is that drives Benny. Silence, it seems to me, is what allows for the action in the world to occur. Silence and quiet and passivity are the real engine for action, reality, and daily activity.

Silence and prayer and contemplation are there to help keep everything going, energy moving. Call on such folks as Commonwealth Electric, or Edison, or General Electric to power the universe. Yet the big corporations need the silent and lone figures to be able to operate. Without the word, or the prayer to one's lord, the world won't work. It hasn't the energy.

The president, Mr. Clinton prays, as does the lower person, the one who fills the shelves at the Stop and Shop down a ways from the Manhattan Bagel. I visit this twenty-four hour a day store and when I pass up the aisle at six or so, one of the shelf- fillers looks at me with bleary and angry eyes that I have interrupted the work and prayer. Like "how dare you come to my world when I don't want to see you now. You interrupt me." Humans who stock shelves pray, even though we don't think they do.

Before action comes an idea. Always. It is that idea that I am formulating. An idea that is positive. One that is posited in the room of art and prayer and joy and fun.

All humans form words, poems and prayers. They are derived from the shepherd and the people he or she spawns and sponsers. Prayer or art or whatever it is I am talking about comes from the one called Benton Frazier, the cutout Marilyn Monroe, and even me. Don't laugh. It is possible, you know. The greek poet, Seferi, said any of us could be a poet if we could but stand being alone. I have, and so, I may be a poet. Who knows? Seferi and Cavafi know.

Miller reveals that the shepherd skates the pond of eternity, because he lives in a constant present. That is where art is always, at the edge of such a pond. It is where Reginald Marsh creates his marvelous drawings, ones that have sustained me for some months now around the holidays of late 1996. They have made my food for me over these months. The blessedness of Mr. Marsh's life in mine. A possessed being toiling alone year after year, outside the fashionable schools of art in his day. Reginald Marsh is an authentic American Hero.

Or is it Florine Stettheimer who made my Christmas, my Halloween's, my Thanksgiving this year past? Her incredible and lone effort at beauty. What an American beauty rose. Florine, you have punctured my bubble. Love you so. You are in my room with me, at my elbow, as I contemplate beauty. As I think about the shepherd, on the hill who thinks art. Who revels in the ancestors and makes them live..... in art, in words, in phrases, in sentences and lines of poems.

So much of "Due South," is completed in the rooms of art, in the mind of the lone shepherd. The producers and directors and the actors enact a gorgeous drama. Once in a while people and machines come together to be great, immortal, and there is barely an episode of the show, "Due South," that is not special and powerful. Like the minds of the shepherd or the great American artist Marsh or Stettheimer.

The story the artist tells, the one the shepherd rehearses, is endless. The same story is said time and next time. It is a story worth repeating. It rises from a sleepy hillside every day, as the sheep tinkle with the bells under their necks and they shake the night and they begin to forage for the day.

Go to a hillside near you early in the day, and you will hear the little bells under the necks of the sheep and imagine the shepherd against the sky and the hill standing there. Or think of Frazier and the cutout in Sozio's window, and Marsh and Stettlheimer in your reverie.

They toll another day in paradise. The earthly one. The one we occupy. Isn't it strange religions promise us later, what we can have now if we will see it?

Well Frazier is special, kind of. I wrote down in an earlier draft he is a god. But I changed my mind. I don't know what a god is, so how can I call him a god? It confuses me when I call him that. He is just you and me writ large. In imagining, we all get to exaggerate our selves, to give us a false an uncalled- for courage. All it is, is tricks on ourselves to get through the day. So as not to worry about money and disease and unemployment. Frazier is just kinda special.

Miller enjoins us some more. He has to hammer it in, so to speak, because many of us don't really get it. That life can be special like Frazier makes it, if we only have faith, and remain bright and cheery. Miller always spoke of remaining himself bright and cheery all his life. He was bright and cheery all the time, according to friends and biographers.

He speaks to us, an American looking at a Greek landscape. Shucks I looked at Greece when I was there and saw nothing. I was too worried about some stupid thing or other to understand the miracle of the shepherd in the hills. I heard the bells all day long on the island of Meyisty, back in 1988, and you might say I didn't hear anything. It is a lone place, remote in the Aegean. I stood on a hill where I could see the adjoining island of Ro, where once lived the widow of Ro. They used to bring her supplies from Meyisty. She chose to live alone there. I would stand on a hill and watch Ro and hear the sheeps' bells all the time and I might have been hearing the traffic in Times Square, for all it meant to me.

I had to read Miller on the way he saw Greece, my own country, to get the message. I should be ashamed of myself, but I recognize how wrong I am about so many things I do and see, so I am not surprised.

Just grateful I got another chance to dream and hope and think on the miracle of creation. As seen in Greece and in Revere and in American art. Miller feeds me with the image of the shepherd. So, why not admit it? Hey?

Miller. "On these hillsides forever and ever there will be the shepherd with his flock; he will survive everything, including the tradition of all there was."

Plainly we have among us special beings. We have, Miller tells us, forgotten to look at the sight of the gods. He calls the shepherd a living god among us. Strong words but who am I to doubt? I am too weak to object.

If I was a real Greek I would know the myths that have sustained us in the West for a few thousand years. I pride my self in knowing none. I could go to the library and read about this or that god or this or that hero or heroine. I have studiously avoided that. Miller did that homework for me. I read him about the gods he saw and felt in Greece and in Asia Minor.

For you see I am an American. I call myself Greek but know I am a fake. I borrow of Seferi and Kavafi, but a real Greek knows I am winging it. Really, I don't get it at all.

I am a parking lot person. Stranded in a parking lot up in Revere on Route sixty, a mile or so from the rotary where the Squire Club is, where near-naked women process while the men and other women drink alcohol. I am no Greek. Nor a lone shepherd, a Greek one. I really know not what to say here, other than to suggest that Frazier is the stuff of greatness, even godness, in the sense Miller describes.

Stuffy, quiet, proper, decorous, decent. Maybe Miller would find Frazier too staid to be special. In truth Frazier is a bureaucratic representative, a Mountie who represents the Canadian government and he is, too, a police officer in Chicago. Most of Miler's heroes in his assorted books have been deviants and oddballs. Against the grain of society. So I am not sure Miller would approve of Benton. I see a way in which this quiet hero does approximate the stance of the shepherd Miller describes, so I just have to go with it.

I simply collect quiet figures and label them singular. I don't call them gods or transcendent beings or ghosts or mythical characters or dead ancestors. They are images in my head, is all. I maintain that is a reasonable thing to do; to collect images that relate to me and my concept of the world.

The cutout in the window fits into my world, the one I call the Lady of the Lot. The woman who picks up cans and bottles fits. We are all lone and passive, hearing some sorts of sounds or music or something. It is a quiet intersection that pulses with a very muted music. Out of it comes little words and poems and this vid.

I will quit now and quote page 96 of Miller's "Colossus of Maroussi." "When you spot anything true and clear you are at Zero. Zero is Greek for PURE VISION."

Some parts of anyone's daily life can be special. That is really all I am arguing. I have always had a charmed life. When I photograph down in my village, Dover, the light is always kind. I know what to shoot, how and in what order. Today the little machine, my Infinity Junior camera and I, will get to town. I shall start in the lower parking lot of the town hall, take a picture of the drug store my friend Danny McKeon owns and proceed to the tree back of the town hall I picture all the time in the videos I produce. For luck, I say. Then walk to the cemetery and catch shadows on the stones with the town hall in the far background. That... and then to the new police station and the postoffice to see if anything is to be found. I travel over my town. I live here, I say to myself. This is my place. I am of this place I have lived in for so many years.

I also have a piece of me at Bob's. Hey Bob, says I, like in the song by Crash Test Dummies. There is a line in "Superman's Song," that starts with, " hey, Bob." I say to the real Bob, my pal at Bob's Discount, a man I have hung with for many, many years. At whose side I have seen one thing or two. Hey Bob, I say.

I just see the start of 1997 this way. Last week I went to another Bob's who got a joint up in West Medway. I go there every Sunday for milk. To a farm. And he says to me what I wish to relate.....oh, he is very, very special to me, like the other Bob is, like the shepherd is, like Miller is, like Marsh is, like Stetheimer is, like the Mountie is. I see Bob. Bob Briggs

He pulls over a milk box and I sit. We just talk. On his right shoulder I see animal hairs. I don't get it, why the hairs are there, but I figure some damn cows' belly hairs get on him as he milks at five-thirty in the morning. I love Bob very much. I would never say this to him, as I would never say it to Bob up in Revere. You don't go around saying you love people these days. I isn't fit. I'll tell you what Bob Briggs said to me in a minute. Ok?

You shouldn't talk to cutout figures in Sozio's window. Yesterday I passed Sozio as he was scurrying from the parking lot into his joint. They sell refrigerators and kitchen sets and things. I said, "Mr. Sozio." I am terrified of Sozio, as I am of people who own things and have authority. I stop the Isuzu, get out and hand him a copy of a photograph, of the cutout Blondy, his window at Christmas with the wreath and the snowman. I told him I am the guy who sometimes cleans the parking lot and wished him a happy New year. He said I was a gentleman and went off.

So Bob Briggs of Shady Oaks Farm, the proprietor, sits across me and we do our own brand of philosophy. I think or rather imagine he looks forward to our weekly confessionals as I do. Anyway I get to leave and he comes over the car as I depart. A Selectman's wife....the town is Medway, had got a bale of hay for a rabbit and Bobby stuck it in her trunk and came over to say goodbye as he is often want to do.

He says the most important thing in the world is each other. This hits me over the head. He is always teaching me.

He not only says this, which makes some kind of sense but says the other thing is to smile. That smiling in our living is important.

I filter all that as I prepare to go to the village, Dover, and take a few pictures on this first day of the year, 1997.

What it means to me is this. I have been weaned on silence. My dad died with me there in the room of silence on New year's day of 1946. On the second floor of 22 Orchard Street, Jamaica Plain. I watched him dying. The pain of that day in me is palpable to this day. Yet Bob and the shepherd and the other witnesses I have recounted above have made it possible for me to live and thrive and do my little art. It isn't much, but is the best in me.

I make believe I am the lone Greek shepherd. My old culture, the Greek, is important to me. The myth off the teevee, the one of the wonderful Mountie, is important to me, as is my daily life. My early morning walks down Squire Road to the bagel store, my musings on the parking lot at Bob's. My trips to the other Bob's up in Medway to get the week's milk

The art in the books from the library. I am now deep in the 1790's England with Thomas Rowlandson, who influenced Reginald Marsh I am told.

I will now go to the village and see my place. It is very, very cold, but I will make a go of it. Happy new year.